Boss from bowels of hell ends reign of blood and guts

Barely a dozen games played and already people are asking: "Is this the most exciting Premier League season ever?" And who can blame them? England hasn't been gripped by excitement such as this since that day in the early 60s when Mr Del Monte introduced an unsuspecting nation to the kaleidoscopic world of fruit. So far we have seen one player do a somersault, another break his foot and dozens more fire 40-yard diagonal passes nonchalantly into touch. Little wonder that on Match of the Day Alan Shearer was wearing a shirt with shoulder seams reinforced with what looked like masking tape. Such is the exuberance of The Greatest League in the World that it will likely make a pundit's sleeves pop off with joy just thinking about it.

It falls to me then reluctantly to stir a pinch of sadness into the delirium. For during the weekend's predictably Anglo-centric festival of football not one UK media outlet saw fit even to mention the passing of legendary Dutch coach Ruud Luyt, who died on Saturday at the tragically old age of 97.

Luyt was born in the northern Dutch town of Heerenther into a family of such austere Calvinism that on the Sabbath Day even breathing was forbidden.

Perhaps this was what coloured his attitude to the game of football, and indeed his cheeks, which never lost a faint blue-ish tinge even during his years in Spain. While his fellow Netherlander Rinus Michaels would invent Total Football, Luyt's contribution to the lexicon of the game was Totalitarian Football.

Luyt first rose to prominence as a centre-half with Go Ahead Makemijde where he earned a reputation for brutality and commitment. "As a player Ruud wore his heart on his sleeve," recalls team-mate Henk Stoemp, "Whose heart it was we never discovered, though I remember that it was still beating the first time I saw it".

Luyt was no Dutch defensive pin-up boy in the Ronald Koeman mould, however. In fact, as a young man he worked briefly for the painter Francis Bacon as a life model. Many regard the Screaming Pope as a fair likeness of Luyt, though those who knew the Dutchman best insist that it was "slightly prettified and nowhere near as cross looking".

At Go Ahead, Luyt teamed up with an Englishman who was to become his trusted right-hand man for the next 30 years. Vic Dumpling was a rugged Barking half-back whose combination of chirpy Cockney mannerisms and thunderous tackling led fans to dub him "The Man of Tommy Steele". "Ruud was very much the iron fist in the barbed wire glove," recalled former player Svenbo Krump, "while Vic was the one who'd put his arm around your shoulder. Though once in a while he'd squeeze so hard your collarbone shattered."

As a coach Luyt quickly earned a reputation as a man capable of firing up any team with his mix of psychology, hi-tech sporting innovations and good old-fashioned colonic irrigation. His techniques allowed him to get the best out of even the most troublesome players. The temperamental French creative inside-out Gerard Parapluie, for example, had spent an entire season at Barcelona hiding under his bed. But Luyt soon had him playing brilliantly again in the unfashionable Ruritanian League. As Krump remembered, "there were few footballers who didn't discover an extra yard of pace when they saw Big Ruud greasing the nozzle on his power-hose".

Alongside the infamous Paraguayan coach Helenio Garrot, Luyt pioneered an ultra-defensive style - Totalitarian Football - based on the steam-hammer-and-anvil defence. It was a measure of its success that in 1963 his Wacker Zenda side averaged 0.025 goals per game yet still won the Ruritanian title.

Despite offers, Luyt never worked in Britain. One Englishman who did pit his wits against him in the 70s was the genial Geordie Arthur Clarts, then enjoying success on the Iberian peninsular with Sporting Portion. The pair crossed bludgeons in the now forgotten Uefa Inter-Lobo Cup, for which entry was granted to teams from any town in which Me And You And A Dog Named Boo had sold more than 10,000 pressings. "Luyt's sides had a great cup-fighting reputation," Clarts recalls, "In fact they'd fight with anything - bowls, shields, carpets, you name it. That was Ruud, though. After they'd made him they broke the mould and buried the shards separately deep beneath the earth in secret locations."

When he retired from coaching Luyt was a much sought after pundit famous for his pithy remarks of which the most well known are probably "You get nothing for coming second, except a Champions League place and tens of millions of pounds in prize money" and "If God had wanted us to play on the grass, why did he make all that sky?"

Notoriously thin-skinned, Luyt cut off contact with anyone who criticised him. It is reported that by the end of his life he was refusing to speak to anyone at all, including himself.